Download or read book Time and Decision written by George Loewenstein and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2003-02-27 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do people decide whether to sacrifice now for a future reward or to enjoy themselves in the present? Do the future gains of putting money in a pension fund outweigh going to Hawaii for New Year's Eve? Why does a person's self-discipline one day often give way to impulsive behavior the next? Time and Decision takes up these questions with a comprehensive collection of new research on intertemporal choice, examining how people face the problem of deciding over time. Economists approach intertemporal choice by means of a model in which people discount the value of future events at a constant rate. A vacation two years from now is worth less to most people than a vacation next week. Psychologists, on the other hand, have focused on the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of intertemporal choice. Time and Decision draws from both disciplinary approaches to provide a comprehensive picture of the various layers of choice involved. Shane Frederick, George Loewenstein, and Ted O'Donoghue introduce the volume with an overview of the research on time discounting and focus on how people actually discount the future compared to the standard economic model. Alex Kacelnik discusses the crucial role that the ability to delay gratification must have played in evolution. Walter Mischel and colleagues review classic research showing that four year olds who are able to delay gratification subsequently grow up to perform better in college than their counterparts who chose instant gratification. The book also delves into the neurobiology of patience, examining the brain structures involved in the ability to withstand an impulse. Turning to the issue of self-control, Klaus Wertenbroch examines the relationship between consumption and available resources, showing, for example, how a high credit limit can lead people to overspend. Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin show how people's awareness of their self-control problems affects their decision-making. The final section of the book examines intertemporal choice with regard to health, drug addiction, dieting, marketing, savings, and public policy. All of us make important decisions every day-many of which profoundly affect the quality of our lives. Time and Decision provides a fascinating look at the complex factors involved in how and why we make our choices, so many of them short-sighted, and helps us understand more precisely this crucial human frailty.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Economic Behaviour written by Alan Lewis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 1240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has recently been an escalated interest in the interface between psychology and economics. The Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Economic Behaviour is a valuable reference dedicated to improving our understanding of the economic mind and economic behaviour. Employing empirical methods - including laboratory and field experiments, observations, questionnaires and interviews - the Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of theory and method, financial and consumer behaviour, the environment and biological perspectives. This second edition also includes new chapters on topics such as neuroeconomics, unemployment, debt, behavioural public finance, and cutting-edge work on fuzzy trace theory and robots, cyborgs and consumption. With distinguished contributors from a variety of countries and theoretical backgrounds, the Handbook is an important step forward in the improvement of communications between the disciplines of psychology and economics that will appeal to academic researchers and graduates in economic psychology and behavioral economics.

Download or read book Choice Over Time written by George Loewenstein and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1992-10-27 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of our most urgent national problems suggest a widespread lack of concern for the future. Alarming economic conditions, such as low national savings rates, declining corporate investment in long-term capital projects, and ballooning private and public debt are matched by such social ills as diminished educational achievement, environmental degradation, and high rates of infant mortality, crime, and teenage pregnancy. At the heart of all these troubles lies an important behavioral phenomenon: in the role of consumer, manager, voter, student, or parent, many Americans choose inferior but immediate rewards over greater long-term benefits. Choice Over Time offers a rich sampling of original research on intertemporal choice—how and why people decide between immediate and delayed consequences—from a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives in philosophy, political science, psychology, and economics. George Loewenstein, Jon Elster, and their distinguished colleagues review existing theories and forge new approaches to understanding significant questions: Why do people seem to "discount" future benefits? Do individuals use the same decision-making strategy in all aspects of their lives? What part is played by situational factors such as the certainty of delayed consequences? How are decisions affected by personal factors such as willpower and taste? In addressing these issues, the contributors to Choice Over Time address many social, economic, psychological, and personal time problems. Their work demonstrates the predictive power of short-term preferences in behavior as varied as addiction and phobia, the effect of prices on consumption, and the dramatic rise in debt and decline in savings. Choice Over Time provides an essential source for the most recent research and theory on intertemporal choice, offering new models for time preference patterns—and their aberrations—and presenting a diversity of potential solutions to the problem of "temporal myopia."

Download or read book Handbook of Behavioral Economics Foundations and Applications 1 written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handbook of Behavioral Economics: Foundations and Applications presents the concepts and tools of behavioral economics. Its authors are all economists who share a belief that the objective of behavioral economics is to enrich, rather than to destroy or replace, standard economics. They provide authoritative perspectives on the value to economic inquiry of insights gained from psychology. Specific chapters in this first volume cover reference-dependent preferences, asset markets, household finance, corporate finance, public economics, industrial organization, and structural behavioural economics. This Handbook provides authoritative summaries by experts in respective subfields regarding where behavioral economics has been; what it has so far accomplished; and its promise for the future. This taking-stock is just what Behavioral Economics needs at this stage of its so-far successful career. - Helps academic and non-academic economists understand recent, rapid changes in theoretical and empirical advances within behavioral economics - Designed for economists already convinced of the benefits of behavioral economics and mainstream economists who feel threatened by new developments in behavioral economics - Written for those who wish to become quickly acquainted with behavioral economics

Download or read book Behavioral Economics and Public Health written by Christina A. Roberto and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behavioral economics has potential to offer novel solutions to some of today's most pressing public health problems: How do we persuade people to eat healthy and lose weight? How can health professionals communicate health risks in a way that is heeded? How can food labeling be modified to inform healthy food choices? Behavioral Economics and Public Health is the first book to apply the groundbreaking insights of behavioral economics to the persisting problems of health behaviors and behavior change. In addition to providing a primer on the behavioral economics principles that are most relevant to public health, this book offers details on how these principles can be employed to mitigating the world's greatest health threats, including obesity, smoking, risky sexual behavior, and excessive drinking. With contributions from an international team of scholars from psychology, economics, marketing, public health, and medicine, this book is a trailblazing new approach to the most difficult and important problems of our time.

Download or read book Behavioural and Experimental Economics written by Steven Durlauf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Specially selected from The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics 2nd edition, each article within this compendium covers the fundamental themes within the discipline and is written by a leading practitioner in the field. A handy reference tool.

Download or read book Economic Psychology written by Rob Ranyard and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 651 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview of contemporary economic psychology Economic Psychology presents an accessible overview of contemporary economic psychology. The science of economic mental life and behavior is increasingly relevant as people are expected to take more responsibility for their household and personal economic decisions. The text will, in addition to reviewing current knowledge on each topic presented, consider the practical and policy implications for supporting economic decision making. Economic Psychology examines the central aspects of adult decision making in everyday life and includes the theories of economic decision making based on risk, value and affect, and theories of intertemporal choice. The text reviews the nature and behavioral consequences of economic mental representations about such things as material possessions, money and the economy. The editor Robert Ranyard—a noted expert on economic psychology—presents a life-span developmental approach, from childhood to old age. He also reviews the important societal issues such as charitable giving and economic sustainability. This vital resource: Reviews the economic psychology in everyday life including financial behaviour such as saving and tax-paying and matters such as entrepreneurial activity Offers an introduction to the field and traces the emergence of the discipline, from Adam Smith to George Katona and Herbert Simon Includes information on societal issues such as charitable giving and pro-environmental behaviour Considers broader perspectives on economic psychology: life-span psychological development from childhood to old age Written for students of psychology, Economic Psychology reviews the most important information on contemporary economic psychology with a focus on individual and household economic decision making, ranging widely across financial matters such as borrowing and saving, and economic activities such as buying, trading, and working.

Download or read book Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making written by Derek J. Koehler and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making is a state-of-the art overview of current topics and research in the study of how people make evaluations, draw inferences, and make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and conflict. Contains contributions by experts from various disciplines that reflect current trends and controversies on judgment and decision making. Provides a glimpse at the many approaches that have been taken in the study of judgment and decision making and portrays the major findings in the field. Presents examinations of the broader roles of social, emotional, and cultural influences on decision making. Explores applications of judgment and decision making research to important problems in a variety of professional contexts, including finance, accounting, medicine, public policy, and the law.

Download or read book Intertemporal Choice written by George Loewenstein and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Loewenstein has been at the forefront of progress in bringing together the disciplines of economics and psychology. One area in which he has made a major contribution is in the analysis of intertemporal choice: the extent to which and reasons why we are prepared to defer some immediate benefit for a greater benefit at a later date. This volume includes Loewenstein's most important papers on the topic and an introduction which sets the papers in an overall framework, taking account of current work in this area.

Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making 2 Volume Set written by Gideon Keren and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 1056 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, up-to-date examination of the most important theory, concepts, methodological approaches, and applications in the burgeoning field of judgment and decision making (JDM) Emphasizes the growth of JDM applications with chapters devoted to medical decision making, decision making and the law, consumer behavior, and more Addresses controversial topics from multiple perspectives – such as choice from description versus choice from experience – and contrasts between empirical methodologies employed in behavioral economics and psychology Brings together a multi-disciplinary group of contributors from across the social sciences, including psychology, economics, marketing, finance, public policy, sociology, and philosophy 2 Volumes

Download or read book The Effect of Delay and of Intervening Events on Reinforcement Value written by Michael L. Commons and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1986. This is Volume V of six in a series on Quantitative Analyses of Behavior. Quantitative analysis now generally refers to the fact that theoretical issues are represented by quantitative models. An analysis is not a matter of fitting arbitrary functions to data points. The volumes in the present series have been written for behavioral scientists. Those concerned with issues in the study of how behavior is acquired and then allocated in various environments-biologists, psychologists, economists, anthropologists, and other researchers, as well as graduate students and advanced undergraduates in those areas-should find volumes in this series to be state-of the-art readers and reference works. Each volume of the series examines a particular topic that has been discussed at the annual Symposium on Quantitative Analyses of Behavior held at Harvard University. This volume, V, addresses the topic of how reinforcement value is affected by delay and intervening events. Self-control studies are also presented and discussed.

Download or read book Taming Uncertainty written by Ralph Hertwig and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the cognitive tools that the mind uses to grapple with uncertainty in the real world. How do humans navigate uncertainty, continuously making near-effortless decisions and predictions even under conditions of imperfect knowledge, high complexity, and extreme time pressure? Taming Uncertainty argues that the human mind has developed tools to grapple with uncertainty. Unlike much previous scholarship in psychology and economics, this approach is rooted in what is known about what real minds can do. Rather than reducing the human response to uncertainty to an act of juggling probabilities, the authors propose that the human cognitive system has specific tools for dealing with different forms of uncertainty. They identify three types of tools: simple heuristics, tools for information search, and tools for harnessing the wisdom of others. This set of strategies for making predictions, inferences, and decisions constitute the mind's adaptive toolbox. The authors show how these three dimensions of human decision making are integrated and they argue that the toolbox, its cognitive foundation, and the environment are in constant flux and subject to developmental change. They demonstrate that each cognitive tool can be analyzed through the concept of ecological rationality—that is, the fit between specific tools and specific environments. Chapters deal with such specific instances of decision making as food choice architecture, intertemporal choice, financial uncertainty, pedestrian navigation, and adolescent behavior.

Download or read book Intertemporal Choice and Its Anomalies written by Salvador Cruz Rambaud and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Research Topic of the journals Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Frontiers in Psychology on “Intertemporal choice and its anomalies” has collected ten manuscripts on several fields, which demonstrates that this topic is of interest for many important research activities outside of traditional domains of economics and finance. In effect, the concepts of time preference, rationality and time-inconsistency in intertemporal choice can be applied to a wide variety of social problems such as addictions, retirement plans, and health, among others. On the other hand, the main anomalies or paradoxes in intertemporal choice (such as delay effect, sign effect, magnitude effect, delay-speedup asymmetry, and sequence effect) have been considered, as manifestations of many problematic behaviors of self-control in intertemporal choice.

Download or read book Uncertainty Expectations and Financial Instability written by Eric Barthalon and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Barthalon applies the neglected theory of psychological time and memory decay of Nobel Prize–winning economist Maurice Allais (1911–2010) to model investors' psychology in the present context of recurrent financial crises. Shaped by the behavior of the demand for money during episodes of hyperinflation, Allais's theory suggests economic agents perceive the flow of clocks' time and forget the past at a context-dependent pace: rapidly in the presence of persistent and accelerating inflation and slowly in the event of the opposite situation. Barthalon recasts Allais's work as a general theory of "expectations" under uncertainty, narrowing the gap between economic theory and investors' behavior. Barthalon extends Allais's theory to the field of financial instability, demonstrating its relevance to nominal interest rates in a variety of empirical scenarios and the positive nonlinear feedback that exists between asset price inflation and the demand for risky assets. Reviewing the works of the leading protagonists in the expectations controversy, Barthalon exposes the limitations of adaptive and rational expectations models and, by means of the perceived risk of loss, calls attention to the speculative bubbles that lacked the positive displacement discussed in Kindleberger's model of financial crises. He ultimately extrapolates Allaisian theory into a pragmatic approach to investor behavior and the natural instability of financial markets. He concludes with the policy implications for governments and regulators. Balanced and coherent, this book will be invaluable to researchers working in macreconomics, financial economics, behavioral finance, decision theory, and the history of economic thought.

Download or read book Elicitation of Preferences written by Baruch Fischhoff and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behavior, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behavior. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a provocative and constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.

Download or read book Economics and Consumer Behavior written by Angus Deaton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1980-05-30 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For advanced courses in economic analysis, this book presents the economic theory of consumer behavior, focusing on the applications of the theory to welfare economies and econometric analysis.

Download or read book Strategic Asset Allocation written by John Y. Campbell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2002-01-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.